1. Simon David Annetts
Hengwm
St. Harmon
Rhayader
Powys
LD6 5LD
Tel: 01597 811822 Mobile: 07932 014055
Email: simon@ateb.co.uk
DOB: 25/06/1967
WORK HISTORY at Ateb Ltd
Jan 2000 –
Present Day
Director
Ateb Ltd
Rhayader, Powys
Director of Ateb Ltd, a consultancy company which provides software development
and I.T. support. Our clients are mainly in the education sector (local authorities
and schools) and the Welsh publishing sector. Our company has worked with many
clients. Here are some that I have worked with personally (in no particular order):
 BECTa (British Educational Communications and Technology agency)
 The TTA (Teacher Training Agency) which was part of the DfEE
 RedHat – working as sub-contractors to RedHat on some large integration
projects in the education sector
 Powys County Council
 The Welsh Books Council (see Projects #3)
 Worcestershire County Council (see Projects #1 and #2)
 Ceredigion County Council
 Suffolk County Council
 I Education Ltd
 The National Library of Wales
 The Isle of Wight College
 Gwynedd County Council Library Service
 Capita-Group IBS Schools Ltd

2. PROJECTS
2002 –present
day Worcestershire County Council – National Grid for Learning (NGfL):
‘ Server Appliance’ (SA Box) for schools.
Worcestershire has approximately 260 schools, with 16,000 staff, 87,000 pupils and
3,000 governors. The brief was to design a server solution that would provide basic
Internet service to schools within the specification of the government’s National
Grid for Learning programme. The solution should be easy to install and cheap to
run, without any ongoing licensing costs and provide each member of staff and
each pupil with an email mailbox, web based mail access, filtered Internet access
and also file and print services and storage. The system was designed with 100%
open source software, running on a custom built Linux distribution which was
derived from a RedHat/CentOS base. Originally the system was based on Redhat
7.3, but has since seen several upgrades through CentOS 5.x to CentOS 6.x. There
are a number of customised packaged installed on the system as well as a fully web
based user management system which also ties into the Worcestershire ‘Global
Accounts’ system and the Worcestershire Learning Gateway (WLG). The system
provides the following functionality:
1. Connectivity to the internet, either via the County Council’s Broadband
Schools Network, or via VPN through a standard ADSL or FTTC connection
back to the Broadband Schools Network. Firewalling and routing of data to
up to three further networks in the school - an Admin, Curriculum and On-
Hop network (for schools that connect via a feeder school).
2. Filtered internet browsing, where all users Internet requests are proxied
though a filter that categorises web sites by their content and allows or
denies access according to the level of appropriateness. Further rules allow
restriction by time of day, individual users or groups of users etc.
3. Web based email access using Squirrelmail, as well as generic IMAP access
from desktop clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird. Profanity checking of
emails to ensure pupils do not misuse the system.
4. File storage services with on the fly virus checking, each user gets a ‘home’
directory accessible via windows networking shares, provided by
Samba/CIFS application.
5. Easy Web based user management that allows creation of local or ‘Global’
accounts (see project #2), import and export of accounts and groups and
the automatic provisioning of account from the Global directory.
6. Synchronisation of accounts into Google Apps, allowing the same accounts
to exists in the Google Apps realm for both local and cloud based email and
applications
I developed this entire system from scratch starting in 2002, and also helped to
provision all of the core infrastructure within Worcestershire required to
support this, i.e. main Internet links via B.T. and Ja.net, firewalls, email servers
and routers, DNS servers and filtering solutions. I still develop and support this
system today, we have just started rolling out a new ‘v6’ version of the ‘SA Box’
into all 250+ schools in Worcestershire.

3. 2008 –
present day Worcestershire County Council - ‘Global Accounts’ system and
The Worcestershire Learning Gateway (WLG) –http://www.networcs.net/
Worcestershire has approximately 260 schools, with 16,000 staff, 87,000 pupils and
3,000 governors. The brief was to build a single sign on solution for all of these
users that would let them access disparate educational resources and services with
just a single login account per user. The accounts should be created dynamically as
a user enters the Worcestershire education system and should travel with them as
they move schools. The accounts would also be available in Microsoft Active
Directory to enable access to Sharepoint type services provided by a third party as
well as through LDAP and MySQL. In addition, the account data is fed back into the
schools and these ‘global’ accounts are created on servers within the school for
provision of email boxes as well. (see project #1)
The data used to create the directory was drawn from three separate sources:
1. The local authority’s Capita One system which holds Pupil and Governor
data in an Oracle database.
2. Each schools’ SIMs system. Another Capita product used within schools to
hold data on Pupils and Staff in a MSSQL database. One or two schools also
use CMIS (a competing school management system).
3. The County Council’s SAP system, holding details of Staff users, both
teaching and non-teaching.
The second source, i.e. the data from the schools actually breaks down into about
260 separate data sources, all of which are queried at regular intervals.
The user account system has been running successfully for about 8 years now and
the Worcestershire Learning Gateway (WLG) was build on top of this to provide the
single sign on solution using the Shibboleth/SAML authentication system. Users,
groups of users, schools or groups of schools can be granted access to ‘services’
which comprise of educational resources provided by third parties, or hosted
locally. There are currently 176 services available to users of the WLG.
In 2013 the system was further extended to provide accounts for over 5000 funded
childcare providers with data for these being drawn from a MSSQL database.
I designed, developed and coded about 80% of this entire system, with further
input coming from another employee of Ateb Ltd and also Worcestershire County
Council. I still support and maintain this system today, ensuring that it continues to
function smoothly even when occasionally the data sources from the third parties
are changed without notice!
2001 –
present day Welsh Books Council – gwales.com
The Welsh Books Council is a national body, funded by the Welsh Government,
which provides a focus for the publishing industry in Wales. It provides a number of
specialist services (in the fields of editing, design, marketing and distribution) with a
view to improving standards of book production and publication in both Welsh and
English. It helps to promote and sell the nearly 42,000 titles via its website

4. http://www.gwales.com
I was involved with the development of gwales.com right from the beginning in
2001. Since then the site has seen numerous improvements and redesigns,
including the addition of secure credit card and Paypal facilities and also E-books
and Web Apps support. There is also a Shop Support scheme which allows users to
buy books from gwales.com, but nominate a local bookshop that should get the
sale profit. I am the sole developer and maintainer of this site now and continue to
add new features as and when requested by the Welsh Books Council when they
receive grant funding to do so.
There are also two related projects to this one:
‘Gwales Libraries’ is a similar website to gwales.com, but it is designed specifically
for Library staff to be able to order titles for their Library through their County
Council purchasing channels. It allows for hierarchies of users, from a librarian who
may create a wish list of titles, through to a purchasing officer who will build and
collate the final orders. This system is used by all libraries in the 22 Local
Authorities in Wales.
‘GwalesCD’ is another derivative of gwales.com, which provides a standalone CD
based system that Welsh Books Council Sales Reps run on their laptops. It can run
without an Internet connection and can take and store orders taken in shops and
schools and transmit them back to the distribution centre at a later time when an
Internet connection is available. The Reps use this system across the whole of
Wales.
I continue to provide support and maintenance for all three sites as well as
providing more general I.T. support for the organisation and it’s back office
systems.